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Rise & Fall

In these past few weeks my team and I have been showing off our ROM Game Jam game, Rise & Fall, to public audiences at the Royal Ontario Museum and Gamercamp 2013. I wanted to write about my full experience at both of these sessions in this post, but it got really long. Therefore, I decided to break it up into multiple parts to be posted over the next week or so. In this first part, I’ll talk about my experiences with the playtesting of Rise & Fall. If you been to this blog before, then you know the deal with Rise & Fall. If not, click here and read. I’ll wait for you to finish.

Done? OK. The game was first playtested as part of the Ancient Arcade at the ROM for International Archaeology Day (October 19). Our game was displayed on a large monitor and played with two controllers.

As you can see from the picture directly above, I only had one Xbox 360 controller, so I had to use an old Logitech controller as the second one. Unfortunately, it was so old that the game didn’t detect it automatically; I had to use Joy2Key to make it work. Another unfortunate thing was I didn’t bring my male-to-male 3.5mm audio cable to connect my laptop’s headphone jack to the display’s PC Audio In jack (to be fair, I didn’t even know the display had one of those), so I had to turn my laptop towards the players (from behind the display) and crank up the volume to maximum. Even then, the tiny speakers on the laptop couldn’t overpower the ambient noise of the crowds at the museum. The only fortunate thing that happened that day was the discovery of a VGA input port on the display. My laptop, being 5 years old, doesn’t have HDMI output (which would have also fixed the audio problem), only VGA.

The game generally received positive feedback from those who played it (especially from the kids) and some even suggested improvements that could be made. There was one kid in his group of friends that managed to quickly figure out the optimal strategy (read: exploit) of the game and remained undefeated. Later during the day, another gentleman found the same strategyexploit and won a lot of games.One player noted that the game favoured the player who was further ahead, since that player’s artifacts would provide ample cover and making it very difficult for the other player to hit them.

Taking those into consideration, we moved and changed the properties of some of the artifacts to balance the game before we showed the game at Gamercamp. We also added a fifth artifact on each side that don’t serve as platforms or cover, but as an indicator that one side has won. This changed the objective from:

To:

“Defeat your opponent to restore all your artifacts.”

which to me is much less confusing (and less explaining on my part).

The setup for “debut” of Rise & Fall at the Gamercamp Ancient Arcade (November 2-3) was largely the same as the setup at the ROM, except I bought and brought an additional Xbox 360 controller so both players had the same controller to play with and I brought my audio cable, hoping that they would be using the same type of displays as last time, which they did. Even with the audio coming from the display this time, it was still hard to hear the audio amidst the crowd and other games’ audio. Oh well, at least I tried.

Not everyone who played the game gave feedback, but those who did gave positive feedback. Kids seemed to be the most excited of all the playtesters (that’s not to say they weren’t any adult that weren’t excited). We had to compete for attention with the games that were part of the Gamercamp Official Selections, which were being showcased in the same space opposite of the Ancient Arcade games. They had way more time to be polished, so it was a bit intimidating, but overall I think we did pretty well out there.

I would like to thank my team members Shmuggly and Goombaguy for helping me helping people learn to play our game at both the ROM and Gamercamp. The next public showing of Rise & Fall is tentatively scheduled for December 6th at the ROM again. We hope to be there again to show off our game some more.

In my next post, I will be writing about the other games at Gamercamp in the following days. Stay tuned to this blog.

(Terrible photography provided by Quadolor Games. With over 2 weeks of experience, DON’T rely on Quadolor Games for your photographic needs.)

It seems like a long time since I last wrote a post. Since I’ve released the beta demo of Gonna Catcha, I have been less compelled to write about it since it’s much easier to learn about the game by playing it than sitting here reading about it. Also, I was going to post about the International Archaeology Day playtest session with Rise & Fall, but the post ended up being not very interesting on it own, so I’m going to combine it with the Gamercamp playtest session post I’ll write about after Gamercamp, which is happening right now. Yay.

In the meantime, I suppose I can talk a bit about what was added to Gonna Catcha since it’s release. Aside from several major bug fixes that somehow slipped through my keen eye, the biggest update to the game is the inclusion of several new options in the game’s Service Mode (fancy arcade talk for “Options Menu”).

Well, there’s your problem.

I feel like I’m being very thorough with the amount of customization you can do with the game, and I haven’t even put in the sound test or let the player customize gameplay settings yet.

During the development of the co-op mode, I had difficulty deciding how to bind the controls to what keys on the keyboard without the two player bumping their hands into each other. Also, what might be the ideal key bindings for co-op might not be for single-player mode and everyone has their own preferences on what the best key bindings are. In the end, I decided to let the player(s) figure out what controls work best for them and put in a key configuration menu.

UNLIMITED POWER!

This is the first time I’ve made a key binding system for a game and it turned out to be less trouble and error-prone than I imagined. GameMaker: Studio has built-in functions for rebinding keys, but I ended up creating my own solution.

With great power comes great responsibility.

I have received some feedback from people who played the demo. Aside from pointing out the bugs, most have praised the retro arcade art style and audio of the game, saying that it’s quite accurate and devoted. One thing that came up was some people had trouble getting the game started because they couldn’t find the “Insert Coin” key. So to help new players, I added “key reminders” on the title screen to help them get started.

I don’t understand your crazymoon controls!

I also made the list of default key bindings clearer in the manual (if people actually read that thing). for those acquainted with the controls, there is an option in Service Mode that allows you to turn the reminders off for a more authentic arcade experience.

Oh man. *tap* *tap* Which button is it?*tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*

What would make it even more authentic is an entire arcade cabinet, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

After some thought and playtesting of the co-op mode, I decided to move the beta release of Gonna Catcha ahead of schedule. I feel the game is stable and complete enough to be playtested by a wider audience. The things I planned to do before I wanted to release the beta has now been moved to the “Beta → Release Candidate” list. What does that mean? Nothing really. Development will continue as it was before, it’s just that there won’t be a high score table or attract mode in the beta right away. Technicalities, blah blah blah. However, before I do release the beta, I do need to do a little bit of tidying and housekeeping to get the game ready (i.e. write documentation and make the interface a bit more user-friendly). Stay tuned to this blog for more information and a special TV offer! (Wait, no.)

Not to leave you empty-handed, here’s a screenshot of the title screen:

Wait, do you even know how to write that on paper?

Gasp! It has a proper title in it now! After many changes and revisions, I’ve settled on “導魂使隊” as the Chinese-character title for Gonna Catcha. “導魂使隊” translates to, or at least what I want it to translate to, “team of spirit-guiding emissaries” or “team of psychopomp emissaries”.

In related and coincidental news, Rise & Fall will also be making its public debut at the “ROM Game Jam: Ancient Arcade” event at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on October 19, as part of International Archaeology Day. My team and I will be there from 1PM-3PM. So if you happen to be going to the ROM that day, feel free to drop by. This will be the first of a handful of planned appearances by Rise & Fall at a public event. Stay tuned to the blog for more information and we’ll double your order absolutely free! Just pay shipping and handling. (Nah.)

This week, I switched gears and went back to mainly working on Gonna Catcha, in particular the co-op mode. Things have been more difficult than I imagined. You’d think that with a game that screams “CO-OP GAMEPLAY!!! (Oh, and you can play solo too.)” I would have designed and coded the co-op part first or at least made the single-player mode in a way that would be easily expanded to co-op gameplay.

Well apparently I didn’t.

For the sake of simplicity, I designed and coded many of the features in the game around the single-player mode. It turned out that the code was so intimate with the single-player mode that it made coding the co-op mode difficult. To give you an idea of what I had to do, I pretty much had to tear out the code for various features from the game, smack the co-op version of that code onto them, then shove them back into the game. The results seem to be working so far, aside from a few hiccups:

But now the code design isn’t as pretty. Oh well, so much for my idealism. It probably won’t matter in the end; I don’t think Gonna Catcha is resource-intensive enough for a few pieces of unoptimized code to have any impact on the performance of the game. When the co-op mode is working properly (for the most part), I’ll upload a video it, but for now, I give you the above.

In other news, there was some footage of a “whoopsie doodles” in the development of Rise & Fall that I forgot to upload last week. I think this is a rather common graphical glitch, but I find it amusing nonetheless:

On this episode of Where Is That Thing You Were Working On Several Weeks Ago Now?, or W.I.T.T.Y.W.W.O.S.W.A.N.? (“Witty Woss Wan”?), we have a gander at Rise & Fall. You know, the thing I worked on as part of the team Robots Mashing Keyboards for the ROM Game Jam. (Oooh, that thing.)

Quite a few things have been added or changed since the ROM Game Jam prototype. The biggest change is the inclusion of jump-through platforms (i.e. platforms that can be passed from below but not above). The original prototype only had completely solid platforms, but to have a greater number and density of platforms in the level, my team decided that we need to have jump-through platforms as well. Seeing how something like this should be Game Programming 101, I should have learned how to do a long time ago, but never did until now. Still, I had to learn it from the source code of this demo by Bill23. Even then, it took me two attempts to get it working right. Other changes are relatively minor, such as adding mercy invincibility, or bug fixes. We will also be changing up some the graphics and adding more levels before the playtest session at the ROM on October 19.

During the development of Rise & Fall, I had encountered the weirdest glitch I’ve ever seen in all my time using GameMaker, even weirder than the ones I’ve seen while working on Gonna Catcha. Furthermore, I don’t think it was (entirely) my fault:

It looked as though GameMaker didn’t rebuild the asset cache after I deleted some objects from the project, so the game ended up drawing the wrong sprites and even creating the wrong objects (i.e. the projectiles seemed to have been replaced with experimental wall section object I had been working on). Clearing the asset cache and rebuilding the game once more fixed everything.

Speaking of Gonna Catcha, nothing visually interesting has happened with it since the last update, so no video or screenshots for you. However, I did completely overhaul how the game handles round progression, now incorporating the NPC speed multiplier I talked about last time. Alright, that another task down for Gonna Catcha, what left? I really should make a list of these things.

The ROM Game Jam is over and my team, Robots Mashing Keyboards, actually managed to create a fully-functioning game prototype by the deadline. The fruits of our labour is Rise & Fall, a 2-player dueling action game based on two ancient cultures (which was the topic of the jam).

In Rise & Fall, one player takes the role of Roman soldier while the other takes the role of an Egyptian soldier…

…who fight by launching projectiles at each other. They each have four broken artifacts on their side of the arena.

If either player gets hit three times, they “die” and the opposing player gets a point. Each point half-fixes one of the player’s artifacts. In the picture below, the pottery on the Roman (left) side is half-fixed.

When an artifact is fully repaired, it can interact with foreground objects, i.e. players are impeded by and can stand on it and it can block projectiles.

When an artifact is fully repaired for the first time, it’s name pops up on screen so you’ll know what it’s called and you can recognize it when you see it at the Royal Ontario Museum (that was their idea, by the way).

To win, a player must attain nine points: eight points for a full set of repaired artifacts…

We received lots of positive feedback from other jammers and, to my delight, the archaeologists that were helping us with the historical details of the ancient cultures we were making games about. They all got really into it. Also, due to all the hubbub in the room and the crappiness of my laptop speakers, the game’s music wasn’t heard very well. Here it is for you listening pleasure:

So what’s next for the game? Well, the Royal Ontario Museum said they would like to demo all the games made at the game jam to museum patrons in October, giving us two months to work on and polish our games further. Given the positive feedback we received, we are interested in pursuing this further. During the playtesting, we found a few bugs and gameplay balance issues that need to be ironed out, so it looks like we already have an idea on how to move forward with the project. 🙂

Oh man, today was a tiring day, I didn’t even have the extra energy to use Twitter to document my team’s process. Not to mention the confusion and delay when I was taking the subway to the ROM. Oh well.

I was going to create another demo video of what we have so far, but then some new sprites arrived in my email and I just had to put them into the game and test them out. It’s late and I don’t feel like re-recording and editing the video right now, so here’s a screenshot:

Roman guy vs. Egyptian guy

It’s too bad I’m not able to show you a video; the sprite animations and foreground objects are coming along nicely. As you can see, we have a Roman guy and Egyptian guy dueling each other. The Roman throws spearspilums (the archaeological experts at the ROM said the latter was more historically accurate) while the Egyptian shoots arrows. They fight each other to restore their own ancient culture’s artifacts for some unexplained reason and in some unexplained manner. This has baffled and intrigued archaeologists for many minutes. Tomorrow, we’ll finish off the rest of foreground objects, the backgrounds and whatever is left over (well, we have to since it’s the final day).

Normally, I wouldn’t update my blog in the wee hours of the night, but the lack of a good internet connection at the ROM Game Jam has forced me to.

So now I share with you some screenshots of the work that has been done today by me and the rest of Team “Robots Mashing Keyboards” at the jam:

First, a screenshot of an very early version of the game:

FUS ARROW DAH?

I won’t go into details right now, but let’s just say our game will be a 2-player competitive platformer.

Next is a screenshot of a later build of the game, featuring graphics for one of the two characters in the game: some Roman guy, done by team member Shmuggly.

Minimalist architecture

And finally, the highlight of the day came near the end of the day: the inclusion of the Roman guy’s running animation, also done by Shmuggly, into the game. The initial results were hilarious:

The video doesn’t do the run cycle justice; it looks much better (and funnier) at 60 frames per second. The background music was composed by me, hastily over the course of only a few days and still needs a bit of work. Still, I’m actually impressed with how it turned out. When was the last time I even did anything in 3/4 time with the harmonic minor scale?

And now I’m tired, and have to get up early tomorrow to continue jamming. Good night everybody.